Some years back I saw this luggage displayed in a thrift store in California. They had a label, "USSR Cold War Defector Iron Curtain ... Rare... Taking offers."

A visit to my father's village in Bangladesh gave me the chance to confront my father's legacy and reflect on what home has come to mean to me. I wrote an essay about this that was just published in the Washington Square Review.

www.washingtonsquarereview.com/mahmud-rahman

I am re-reading Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, feeling grateful that she got an NEA Creative Writing fellowship to create this excellent novel. Now comes the news that the agency will no longer support such grants. Our culture is diminished when grants like this end. More $ to go for the iron fist.

After the gutting of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is clearly next on the chopping block. The justifications are already being penned.

Tragic. We're on the route of one of their feeder marches. It was so lovely to see last year, our first year here.

With every new revelation from King Musk and Court Blowhard Trump, I keep expecting a scene like this. (Dr Who, Aliens of London). Here's the British PM about to reveal herself as a Slitheen.

Quoted in the NYT today. This is on point. “Roberta Flack underplays everything with a quietness and gentleness... More than any singer I know, she can take a quiet, slow song (and most of hers are) and infuse it with a brooding intensity that is, at times, almost unbearable.” -Julius Lester

The 21st of February 1970, Dhaka, then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The dawn march to the central memorial to the martyrs of the movement for Bengali language rights, 1952. We came from Notre Dame College. 1970 was the year I became an adult. In tense waters, rougher in 1971 when war broke out.

ঠাট্টা করা বড়ই অভদ্রতা -- what moral lessons did you learn with your alphabet acquisition? We learned the Bangla alphabet through the Adorsho Lipi primer. At the very core of that instruction was the imparting of moral lessons. Is this why elders discouraged us from reading 'out books'?

I've never lived in a sports city quite like this before.

The title of the novel was a tribute to Russian writer Boris Pasternak's poem My Sister, Life.

The original novel was written within months of Bangladesh winning its independence in December 1971.

Excited to share that that my project of translating Bangladeshi writer Mahmudul Haque's novel "My Sister, Life,' in collaboration with Shabnam Nadiya, has been awarded a 2025 Translation Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Behold, the latest wisdom from the richest and allegedly smartest man in the universe. We might no longer have a Dept of Education but a Dept of Phrenology is coming. Perhaps Tesla will even start selling craniometers. Why don't they just rename themselves as the Know Nothing and Proud of It Party.

On the eve of 2025, I'd like to share this quote I once saved. Crucial bit from the quote: “Everything evolves. Nothing lasts. Don't destroy that which your people depend on. Take care, and plan for the seventh generation, the long future.”

Still finishing the last books I'd begun reading in 2024. This one took a few months. But what a fascinating journey through the history and language diversity of the city where more languages are spoken than any other. Karan Mahajan in conversation with the author: www.bookforum.com/print/3004/r...

Sad to hear that Bapsi Sidhwa died today. Over the years I enjoyed reading several of her novels and stories.

Man working on a mound of coal, next to the riverbank, Khulna, Bangladesh, February 2008. Photo taken while returning from a tour of the Sunderbans.